Packaging material blanks for multipacks intended for bottles, cans or other containers are known. Typically, the individual containers are held firmly on the edges or outsides by a package blank, which surrounds the containers with a covering surface at the top and with side parts on the sides of the containers and is joined to a bottom part. In such packages, to protect or secure the contents against sliding or falling out, the packaging material blank, or package, should have front and end parts, or side parts, that can be folded or glued. Packaging material blanks of this type are known, for instance from European Pat. No. 0 044 169, French patent application No. 22 91 112, and European Pat. No. 0 042 711. Because of the variety of types of packaging material blanks, which typically have a certain rigid, invariable cross section defined by the various folding or cohering parts and by the gluing tabs, tearing of the package or packaging tube can occur when the product is introduced into such packages, because of differences in tolerances or dimensions, especially in bottle heights, or else the localized strain where the blank is glued can cause the package to burst at those points.
To assure the most problem-free introduction of the product into the package, especially in packages having several rows of bottles of different heights disposed side by side, and thus to assure problem-free operation of packaging plants as much as possible, there is a need for flexible packages that can be adapted to the product they will contain.
Previously, a package surrounding containers on all sides could be attained only with packages, or packaging material blanks, of which the dimensions, i.e. the cross section that was required, that were arranged for the maximum tolerances of the product in the package, especially in terms of the height of the product. As a result, additional provisions had to be made to protect the containers from colliding with one another or slipping. This sometimes necessitates special selection of the product to be packaged, such as bottles. This is extremely uneconomical, and all the more so when such packages are disposable, single-use packages.